Thursday, June 17, 2010

Join our Cult

Given their debut album's still not properly released until 26th July - a state which hasn't stopped them starting to record its follow-up this week - we don't need to write about Love Ends Disaster! again quite yet just as much as you don't want to read us trying to think of a new way of describing them. Luckily for us all there is a side project. One with very different ambitions of its own, too - Moscow Youth Cult is LED! guitar wrangler Jon Dix plus Dan from Leicester's currently dormant psych-pop youths Actionforce. 8-bit is their domain, second hand keyboards and woozy noisemakers allied to psychedelic layered beats and nods to Mute Records-issue electro and shoegazing's manicured noise combining to give the impression of Boards Of Canada out-takes, Fuck Buttons demos (less eager to fill every single space) and mooted last tracks on Chemical Brothers albums all copied off a dusty Betamax tape. Or as they put it, "loosely themed around fuzzy old VHS tapes of strange 70s sci-fi films, and badly acted 80s horror films which you occasionally find yourself watching at 4am, all alone and confused". They play Leicester Phoenix Square for free on the 26th. The album is merely being passed around like secret documents of THE FUTURE at the moment while they work out who to approach for a deal; in the meantime four of its tracks are here.

While we're talking beats plus guitars, Chicago duo Coltrane Motion are a band we've praised on here before, taken as we were by their 2007 album Songs About Music and its "noisy retro-futurist psychedelic synths being deliberately overheated by the ghost of shoegazing". They describe new record Hello Ambition! as "somewhere between Yo La Tengo and LCD Soundsystem". The former we can definitely see, their guitars being set to stun over broken college rock. Their beats, though, are foggy and heavy, decorating songs that range from baroque Sixties suggestions to fuzzy dreampop without the necessarily low fidelity, covered where required in organ, distortion and drone like Stereolab attempting to play Nuggets garage psychedelia. Still no news of any UK activity - hope they're not waiting for us to utilise any influence - but they have a handful of Illinois gigs coming up and a slot at Pop Montreal at the end of September. Stream and/or buy from Bandcamp; get direct from the band's own datawaslost label.